Hacker News Reader

Comment by thombat | Hacker News Reader

Now you've made me wonder: those hours I spent mesmerised by watching the colourful display of Windows 95 defragging the disc, would I have paid a monthly subscription for it? What if they'd added achievements, or leveling up? "Congratulations! Your wizard can now restructure directory chains!"

View on HN

http://progressquest.com/

Apparently the original idle game (according to wikipedia at least) although modern idle games are probably influenced by Cookie Clicker and others as well.

I've occasionally been tempted to play Idle Champions which seems similar.

I'm pretty into the idle/incremental game concept, though they're rarely implemented to my taste.

It's difficult to quantify what makes a good one, but my favorite is Universal Paperclips.

https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html

Man, this is great, I've just wasted 30 minutes playing this.

Thankfully it can wrap up in about 5 hours (as you may've discovered), unlike some of them...

The old #idlerpg was fun, in a historic sense (reading the log). I wonder when that got written. Anybody remember? Google doesn't.

Idle Champions is fun but the numerical scaling on that game is whacky. It only takes like a month before you're doing 1 googol (1^100) damage and little dwarves or gnolls or rats or whatever drop a similar amount of gold. They say it's to differentiate effectively between linear and exponential scaling, but the end result is just whacky.

It's the only game I've ever played where your damage output is most effectively measured by the size of its exponent

I once defragged a drive multiple times, which promptly killed it, so I'm not sure how turning it into a game would have turned out.

Hmm, that's a pretty powerful proof-of-work mechanic you've got there. "DefragCoin", anyone? Now we just need a way to achieve unilateral consensus about whether a given HDD is dead...

(/s)

I've seen people watching mesmerized as a Roomba vacuumed the floor. A time saving device indeed!

Don’t forget to prep the floors before every run!

Prep the floors?

Floors need to be tidy for the robots to do their work (no clothes on the ground). There might be places that are difficult for the robot to clean without help - chairs might need to be put out of their way. In my home I put a plank to make a step smaller, if I don't, it can't go to the bathroom.

One guilty individual here o/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com